Thursday, October 6, 2011

Bushwick Campus Farm: Dinner Time!

September 16th was a big night for the Bushwick Campus Farm. The local online news site BUSHWICKBK was kind enough to cover it here. It was only a few months earlier that students from the school were constructing soil beds and planting the first seeds. Thanks to the work of Farm Managers Joe Chavez and Maggie Cheney along with green team students and volunteers, the garden has become lush and quite dense! So to celebrate, we invited allies of the farm like Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez and the principals of the Bushwick Campus, volunteers, and Bushwick High students to a delicious dinner.
Sungold cherry tomatoes garnished the salad's freshly harvested greens and radishes. Sean-Michael Fleming cooked eggplant a la Bushwick which Chrissy's Cooking Club served alongside kale and potato samosas, mushrooms and green beans, peach crisp, and lemon-basil ice cream.

A lot of the food was donated by outside groups and businesses like Boswyck Farms and Verde, but much of it was grown at Bushwick Campus Farm, and speaking as a long-time volunteer it was humbling to see the product we at the farm had worked so hard on turned into such delicious and satisfying dishes. This, in many ways, is the epitome of the movement back to local food: knowing where your food is coming from and where it's been every step of the way. In this case it went from Maggie and Joe's hands to Sean's hands. Then we ate. No trucks, airplanes, pesticides, etc. needed. Neat, right?

Of course this is only the very beginning. Tomorrow we'll be spending time setting up the hydroponic "farm in the sky" at Fireproof East, and we may be expanding the campus farm down the line as well. But right now we're making food our community can enjoy every day. Enjoy!